Stewart with her trophy after winning Best Supporting Actress Award for her role in the film Sils Maria (Clouds of Sils Maria) during the 40th Cesar Awards ceremony in Paris on Friday night.
AFP/Paris
Twilight megastar Kristen Stewart won best supporting actress for her role in Clouds of Sils Maria at the Cesar awards on Friday, the first American actress to ever take home one of the so-called French Oscars.
Best known for playing Bella in the blockbuster vampire romance-thriller trilogy, Stewart’s role in Clouds of Sils Maria alongside Juliette Binoche is a return to the indie films that marked her early career.
Directed by France’s Olivier Assayas, the movie stars the 24-year-old Stewart as the personal assistant to a famous actress played by Binoche and follows their complex, sexually-charged relationship.
Clouds of Sils Maria premiered at Cannes last May.
Stewart said that she was honoured to work with the Oscar-winning Binoche – she shouted out “I love you Juliette” in French, as she collected her Cesar in Paris – and described the film as complex and something of a hard sell.
“It’s not marketable, it’s not easy to sum up. Its ideas are not packaged and delivered in the way that American films do. It doesn’t think for you, it lets you think,” she said during the Cannes festival. “It’s a rare opportunity for a young actress, an American actress, to be in a movie like that and I jumped at it.”
Clouds of Sils Maria is the latest in a series of films featuring the California-born Stewart to earn critical acclaim.
In Still Alice, she plays the daughter of Oscar-nominated Julianne Moore, who portrays a linguistics professor suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Stewart’s role as an aimless young woman in the 2010 Welcome to the Rileys nabbed her a BAFTA Rising Star Award and also a best actress win at the Milan International Film Festival.